COVID-19 Effects on Anxiety and Depression in American Households

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Data Set

3. Importing Libraries & Loading Data Set

4. Goals & Tasks

5. Exploratory Data Analysis

6. Conclusions

7. Reference

Introduction

Besides killing more than 1.1 million Americans to date, the COVID-19 pandemic has also caused a heavy toll on mental health. According to the US. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), more than four-in-ten U.S. adults had developed symptoms of depression or anxiety during the pandemic. Here we will explore a data set provided by the US Census Bureau to visualize the effects of Covid-19 on different social groups in America. The information may be of interest to policy makers, health care providers, scientific researchers, and the public in general.

Data Set

To monitor changes in mental health in the U.S., NCHS partnered with the Census Bureau on an experimental data system called the Household Pulse Survey. The respondents took the survey to report symptoms that are associated with generalized anxiety or major depressive disorder, e.g., how often they have felt down, depressed, hopeless or anxious, and how often they have been unable to stop worrying or shown little interest or pleasure in doing things over the last two weeks. The questions are a modified version of the two-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2) and the two-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-2) scale on the Household Pulse Survey.

Data set name: Indicators of Anxiety or Depression Based on Reported Frequency of Symptoms During Last 7 Days

Key features that will be included in the analysis:

Data collection began on April 23, 2020 and the data set was recently updated on Nov. 29, 2022. The most recent data set is available here.

Importing Libraries & Loading Data Set

Goals & Tasks

Why?

Mental health during the COVID-19 is an important topic. Here I would like to visualize the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on anxiety and depression in different groups of American residents. The information may be of interest to policy makers, health care providers, scientific researchers, and the public in general.

How?

What?

Users can see the COVID-19 effects in different social groups based on:

Where?

The task is based on data sets that focus on the American households.

When?

Users can use the figures when they have a specific question in mind or just explore to gain some insights.

Who?

Anyone who is interested in this topic may find some useful information.

Exploratory Data Analysis

Load the data into a data frame

Data cleaning and preparation

The Value column shows the percentage of adults who report symptoms of anxiety or depression that have been shown to be associated with diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder. To avoid confusions, we change the column name to Psychological Distress Level.

To avoid overcrowding in the following analysis, we replace the values in column Indicator with a shorter version.

We can see that the data set is grouped by different factors:

Based on these factors, we could divide the full data set into multiple subsets for further analysis.

Great! Now we are ready to perform the tasks.

The survey collected data from American residents who report symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. First we would like to know the distributions of these symptoms.

The data set contains survey data of 51 time periods of two weeks each (April 2020 - November, 2022). We can see that the level of different symptoms have shown similar patterns and fluctuated since COVID-19 pandemic began.

The main goal is to see whether covid pandemic increased people's anxiety/depression differently in different groups.

First, we focus on age data and plot a bar chart. The vertical stacked bar represents the total anxiety/depression level in a given group.

Experiences of anxiety and/or depression are especially widespread among young adults, and the symptoms levels appear to drop as the age increases. Next we will check how symptom levels correlate with race groups.

It's clear that the negative effects of the pandemic have hit Black and Hispanic adults harder than other race groups.

In terms of education level, it seems that people with the highest education reported least symptoms, and people with poor education experienced symptoms more densely than other subgroups.

Next we look at the effects in groups with and without disabilities.

Next, we would like to compare people with different gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. As shown below, the sexual and gender minorities have worse mental health compared to the majorities.

Most people who view the charts above would agree that the pandemic has exacerbated existing health inequalities! The negative effects have hit harder on social groups who already face disadvantage and discrimination, particularly in people who have Black and Hispanic ethnic backgrounds, and who are sexual and gender minorities.

Finally, we will look at different states in America. Here we will compare the average Psychological Distress Level between different states.

In the interactive plot above, we can mouse-over a state to quickly see its Psychological Distress level. With the heat map, we can see a pattern that states in different regions are quite different.

Here we divide all the states into four statistical regions based on the Census Bureau region definition, WEST, MIDWEST, NORTHEAST, and SOUTH, which is commonly used for data collection and analysis.

To look at the state data more closely, the interactive chart below is pretty useful with intuitive navigation. Clicking the play button will automatically show the data from time periods 1 to 51 (i.e., from April, 2020 to November, 2022). If needed, we can stop at any point by clicking the pause button, or we could specifically select a time period to look at the relevant data. The point with different colors helps users to identify people with different symptoms. If we hover over a point, it will show the detailed information, such as state name, symptoms, time period, region, and Psychological Distress level.

Conclusion

We have used a data set from the US Census Bureau to visualize the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on psychological distress level in American households. The charts with pie, lines and bars allow us to easily make comparisons. The final interactive chart gives us a chance to explore the effects on different regions across America and answer some questions we may have in mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing health inequalities within societies and between different population groups. The negative effects have hit harder on social groups who already face disadvantage and discrimination, particularly in people who have disabilities, who have Black and Hispanic ethnic backgrounds, and who are sexual and gender minorities. Action should be taken swiftly to sufficiently meet the needs of these individuals, helping them to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and be well equipped to endure any similar strains in the future.

Reference

https://www.apaservices.org/images/tile-practice-anxiety-depression-covid-19_tcm9-271978.jpg

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Indicators-of-Anxiety-or-Depression-Based-on-Repor/8pt5-q6wp

https://yourfreetemplates.com/us-region-map-template/usa_census_region_map/

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/mental-health.htm

https://github.com/radumanea23